LEAP 2008 Master class 3

Yesterday I attended the third LEAP master class. I was a bit tired, because the evening before I went to a RUSH concert in Rotterdam. It’s very good, but loud performance by these old geezers. Ok back to LEAP stuff; this master class was all about infrastructure. Documentation material and so, you can find in my previous post. It started off with a presentation from Martin Sih, a Technology Solution Specialist from Microsoft. His talked about two things in general: How do I built Infrastructure and do I manage it. To build Infrastructure he went into topics like Infrastructure Optimization, Architectural Guidance (WSSRA), Virtualization (yes Microsoft is building its own VMWare ESX kind of product) and high availability. To manage it all he talked about Dynamic Systems Initiative, Infrastructure management (Complete new System Center software Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Virtual Machine Manager), Technology, People & Process (MOF, ITIL). After this session we went working on cases. The first case was more a discussion session around outsourcing and aspects that need to be addresses like:

Governance model;

Service levels;

Ownership (software, hardware);

Retained organization vs. outsourced organization.

Second case was designing a solution for a high available infrastructure for a bank. We had to consider technologies like virtualization, load balancing, clustering etcetera. Finally we had to indicate impact on our design if uptime requirement is increased from 99.9 to 99.999.

I very much enjoyed this LEAP master class, because it was around a topic I am less familiar with. I learned a lot and cases were very useful. Next master class will be about security identity and access.

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